Conventionally, there are a driving support apparatus to support driving a vehicle like a car safely and an automatic driving apparatus to drive a vehicle automatically. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 11-212640 and Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 10-261193 disclose such examples. Below, conventional vehicle systems to drive a car automatically are explained.
The conventional vehicle system installed in each vehicle obtains traffic conditions of the driving route from the GPS (Global Positioning System) to calculate the best driving route and the system drives a car automatically based on (i) position information of lane marks of the road obtained from the CCD (Charge Coupled Device) camera and the like, (ii) information communicated between nearby vehicles, and (iii) navigation information from the GPS.
The other vehicle system installed in a vehicle obtains traffic conditions of the driving route from the GPS and the LCX (Leakage Coaxial Cable) to calculate the best driving route and detect lane markers placed on the road with certain intervals. Then the system drives a vehicle automatically based on detected information of these lane markers and information obtained from the communication between driving vehicles on the road and the LCX.
In such systems, to grasp the driving orbit accurately is substantially important, therefore, some people make a suggestion to use a map database of a car navigation system.